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Welcome to the WISCAPE Blog

Thank you for visiting our blog. We aim to provide a space for WISCAPE faculty, staff, and others to share their viewpoints on key issues and trends in postsecondary education and invite discussion with the broader community. The opinions expressed in blog posts are the authors' own and do not reflect the official views of WISCAPE.Subscribe to receive notifications of WISCAPE blog posts.

We asked Z Nicolazzo (pronouns: ze/hir and she/her/hers), the author of "Trans* In College: Transgender Students' Strategies for Navigating Campus Life and the Institutional Politics of Inclusion," to share a bit about hir research and perspective on the experience of trans college students in advance of hir visit to UW-Madison next week.

Higher education institutions in the U.S. are typically funded by some combination of the following revenue sources: state appropriations (at public institutions), tuition/financial aid, research grants, auxiliary services, and philanthropy. The focus of this primer will be on the philanthropy revenue source, and more specifically, the university endowment.

Take a snapshot of our current higher education landscape, and the innumerable challenges facing us might cause some to ​turn away from the picture. As Cathy N. Davidson points out in The New Education: How to Revolutionize the University to Prepare Students for a World in Flux, recently published by Basic Books, we are in a period of rapid transformations, akin to the Panic of 1857 with the rise of new technologies ​such as telegraphy.

The rapid growth in the number of Latinx people in the United States has resulted in an increased proportion of Latinx students in our nation’s educational system. Despite the various barriers faced by some Latinx students within this system, cumulatively we are experiencing positive gains in the number of students entering and persisting in grades K-12 and into college. The purpose of this blog post is to briefly feature some of these achievements in educational outcomes for Latinx students and to highlight the strategic planning of a few Wisconsin colleges in relation to this population.

We asked ​Andy Hall and Dee J. Hall, ​founders of the award-winning Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism (WCIJ), some questions about ​the center, their work with students, and the importance of investigative reporting in advance of their upcoming WISCAPE talk, "Training Truth Tellers: An Experiment at UW-Madison Shapes the Future of Investigative Reporting."

Limited comments, and minimal critical feedback, have emerged from UW System administration; UW-Madison faculty, staff, and campus administrators; and 72 county leaders and others about the proposed transfer of UW-Extension Cooperative Extension (COOP) from UW-Extension to UW-Madison, which is part of the larger proposed UW Colleges and UW Extension Restructuring. Before the UW System Board of Regents vote on the proposal in November​ -- or, more likely, in spring 2018​ -- several critical questions should be asked, discussed, and answered. Below are several reflections ​ -- and there are more​ -- that should be publicly discussed in numerous locations and settings across Wisconsin.

On October 11, 2017, President Ray Cross announced a proposal to restructure UW Colleges and UW-Extension to “…improve student access and success, increase efficiency and save resources, and better align with Wisconsin’s future workforce needs.” The proposal calls for the integration of the UW Colleges campuses into UW four-year institutions and assigning UW​-Extension divisions to UW-Madison and UW System Administration. Interestingly, others, such as John Torinus, have in the past suggested a regional approach to Wisconsin’s public postsecondary education. Below are some reflections aimed at contributing to the public dialogue.

We live in a world where we practice censorship daily. In an era where we lament the political gridlock of a two-party system that seems to be failing us, more often than not we mimic the tendencies of that system.

WISCAPE is excited to highlight two notable ​Ph.D. students in the Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis (ELPA) at UW-Madison who were recently selected to participate in future faculty development programs at the University of Tennessee and New York University.

In advance of ​his visit to Wisconsin ​next week, we asked ​Steven Olikara, the founder and president of the Millennial Action Project and a 2012 graduate of UW-Madison, ​some questions about his experience as a student at UW-Madison, his passion for music, and more.

A statement from nine directors of leading ​centers for ​higher ​education, including WISCAPE’s Clifton Conrad, which was sent to the presidential Task Force on Higher Education Reform chaired by Jerry Falwell, Jr. The document outlines seven keystone challenges facing higher education and the role of the federal government in addressing these challenges.

In the fall of 1940, 17-year-old Frances Murphy of Baltimore, Maryland, arrived at the University of Wisconsin. She was the last of the Murphy sisters to attend: Carlita was a sophomore, and Ida had graduated in May of that year and now worked in advertising at the family newspaper, Baltimore’s Afro-American. Jim Crow had forced the sisters more than 800 miles west to study journalism, a major not offered at historically Black Morgan State College (now Morgan State University). Their father, Carl J. Murphy, a former Howard University professor and prominent newspaper editor, demanded that the state of Maryland pay full tuition, and trips home, for his daughters, since the University of Maryland, which did offer journalism, was closed to African Americans. The governor consented, and installments were paid to the ​UW.

After reading a recent New York Times feature, “How Cuts to Public Universities Have Driven Students Out of State,” Nicholas Hillman, a WISCAPE faculty affiliate, decided to take a closer look at where Wisconsin students go when they go out of state for college.

​Summer blockbuster movies haven’t been released, many K-12 schools are still in session, the Republican and Democratic national conventions haven’t taken place, and the Green Bay Packers preseason practices haven’t begun​. However, it is not too early for speculation on Wisconsin's 2017-2019 biennial budget.

Most colleges and universities operate police departments like the ones at UW, Penn St., UC Davis, and Cincinnati. However, oversight from the larger community -- including faculty, students, and staff -- is often unclear or lacking.